“Duniya jhukti hai, jhukanewala chahiye” -- the world bows, you just need someone to make it happen -- exulted Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) founder Abhijit Dipke soon after Dharmendra Pradhan resigned as education minister under pressure from the street agitation led by his outfit.
Ironically, the slogan, borrowed from a 1951 Bollywood film, was used by a Gen Z movement to celebrate its triumph in the standoff with the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Few could begrudge Dipke’s boast.
His outfit forced the Modi government to back down for only the second time in its 12-year tenure, the first being the repeal of the three controversial farm laws after months of sustained farmers’ protests in 2021.
What makes the CJP’s victory remarkable is its “winner-takes-all” outcome.
It succeeded in securing all three of its demands: Pradhan’s resignation, compensation for the families of those who died by suicide following the cancellation of the NEET examination, and the withdrawal of any FIRs against the protesters.
In fact, the joke in Delhi is that if the government ultimately had to concede all the CJP’s demands, why did it take so long, and what was the point of the rounds of negotiations held between July 20 and 25?
The CJP leadership repeatedly made it clear that Pradhan’s resignation was non-negotiable.
In the end, the government also accepted the other two demands.
While compensation for the affected families and the withdrawal of FIRs were relatively low-hanging fruit for the government, the real challenge was Pradhan’s removal.
He is widely regarded as one of the key architects of the BJP’s electoral strategy, making his ouster politically far more difficult.
What the farmers’ movement and the CJP agitation have in common is that both were driven directly by the affected stakeholders, with the legacy opposition parties playing only a supporting role, particularly in Parliament, where the CJP has no representation.
The significance of Pradhan’s resignation becomes clearer when viewed against the backdrop of what current Defence Minister Rajnath Singh once said during the controversy surrounding former IPL chairman Lalit Modi.
At the time, the Congress demanded the resignation of several senior BJP leaders for allegedly helping Lalit Modi leave the country.
Rajnath reportedly responded: “Ministers here do not resign. This is not the (Congress-led) UPA; this is the NDA.”
The UPA government, which ruled India from 2004 to 2014, witnessed the resignation of several senior ministers during its two terms, some over corruption allegations and others over alleged administrative failures.
Although leaders from several opposition parties joined Dipke and the student protesters at Jantar Mantar in central Delhi, the epicentre of the CJP movement, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi never visited the protest site.
Instead, he chose to stage a sit-in outside Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s residence in solidarity with the CJP.
To be fair, however, it must also be acknowledged that the opposition parties played a small but significant role in increasing pressure on the government by disrupting the first full week of the monsoon session of Parliament in solidarity with the protesters.
It is a common strategy for governments to hold their ground in the face of public protests, delaying concessions until the political cost of resistance becomes too high.
A former communications strategist for Arvind Kejriwal’s Aam Aadmi Party, Dipke’s greatest challenge was to prove that his massive online following could be converted into real-world mobilisation.
His campaign received a major boost from several prominent social activists, including Sonam Wangchuk.
Born out of a meme in May this year following Chief Justice of India Surya Kant’s reportedly controversial remarks, the CJP managed to achieve within just a couple of months what the opposition parties had failed to accomplish over the previous 12 years.
The chief justice later clarified that his remarks had been misquoted and were never intended as criticism of unemployed youth in general.
He said he was referring specifically to people entering professions with fake or bogus degrees, adding that reports claiming he had insulted young people were “totally baseless.”
On May 16, Dipke formally launched the Cockroach Janata Party as a satirical political movement. He also unveiled a website carrying the tagline, “Voice of the Lazy & Unemployed.”
Dipke described it as a platform for “all the ‘cockroaches’ out there,” with the tongue-in-cheek eligibility criteria including being unemployed, lazy, chronically online, and capable of ranting professionally.
The CJP gathered momentum as public anger intensified over the NEET-UG paper leak.
Dipke returned to India from the United States, where he had earned a master’s degree in public relations, in early June to personally lead the protests near Jantar Mantar.
Just before the protest was called off on July 25, Dipke had one final message for Chief Justice Surya Kant: “I thank CJI Kant for calling us cockroaches. Had you not called us cockroaches, Pradhan would not have resigned.”